Soul Calibur III: The Roar
I can't claim to have played all of the games but I'm a fairly good fan of Namco's Soul series (Soul Edge/Soul Blade, Soul Calibur and the like) and I'm particularly fond of Soul Calibur III on the Playstation 2. I still play that from time to time and never got round to completing it fully.
And one of my biggest habits when playing it was sitting back and playing Battle Theater mode. Battle Theater is a mode where you can pretty much have the computer fight itself while you sit back and watch. You can set the timer, difficulty and whether it'll go back to the character select screen or start up another battle with different characters or stages. I always thought this mode was nice and oughta be in more fighting games.
One night I started it up as normal, feeling pretty bored. On the character select screen you can bring up the pause menu and configure things, so I did what I usually do, setting the timer to Infinite and the CPU difficulty to Extremely Hard for a more epic fight. I also set the loop option so that the next battle would have different characters, weapons and stages.
On that screen you usually get 2 random selection options. One of them is the basic random selector, it can choose from the proper playable characters, the bonus characters or even your custom characters. The other starts a match between two characters made up of random Create-A-Character parts, usually with comical results. Tonight I didn't feel in the mood for that and picked the basic random selector.
I picked a random stage as well, and the VS screen showed Siegfried and Nightmare, in their normal outfits. Siegfried had his basic weapon, Requiem, but Nightmare had his ultimate weapon, Soul Edge. I figured it'd be a fairly uneven battle and that Nightmare would probably win this one but that's what you get when you go random. A roll of the dice.
And the stage it picked was the Burning Cathedral stage, where you fight Abyss in Tales of Souls and Quick Play.
During the match I noticed both Sieg and Nightmare were fighting fairly damn hard, with some good hits being dealt. It was set on Extremely Hard though so I wasn't surprised, and SCIII in particular is noted amongst fans for its hard AI. Eventually Siegfried and Nightmare had a win each which meant the next round was, obviously, the last one.
Eventually after around 34 seconds of the AI beating itself up pretty badly, Nightmare finally dealt the winning blow on Sieg. I figured as much since Requiem had no special effects in this game.
When it cut to the normal winpose screen, however, I was taken aback by an unexpected in-game animation that started playing.
It showed Nightmare slamming Soul Edge down into Siegfried's body, pointy bit first.
Nightmare growled, "Now, give me...give me you soul!" one of his usual victory quotes and energy spewed from Sieg's body into Nightmare, whilst Sieg's death cry played.
I was surprised and, truth be told, a bit unnerved at what was obviously Nightmare consuming Siegfried's soul in such a fashion, especially considering I kinda liked Siegfried.
Even moreso was that it was all in-game graphics and sounds, all the stuff one could see in game normally. Even the effects for Sieg's soul were the energy effects for when a character does a Soul Charge, and when Soul Edge hit Sieg's chest the usual hit spark effect exploded out.
After this rather brutal fatality animation had concluded, the next match that loaded was a completely normal battle between Hwang and Tira.
When I later picked Siegfried in other modes he loaded just fine.
Credited to MightyKombat
Originally uploaded on January 4, 2013
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